Introduction

Andrew Whitehead

“I have always loved London”, Alexander Baron once declared. He relished above all the unnoticed, superficially ordinary back streets from which he sprang. It shines through in Baron’s novels of the city. The Lowlife, a cult classic published in 1963 about an obsessive gambler, bears a striking echo of the street on which he grew up, Foulden Road, where Stoke Newington edges into downmarket Dalston. King Dido (1969) shows the imprint of childhood trips to visit grandparents in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. Rosie Hogarth, his most compassionate evocation of the city, gets beneath the skin of an inward looking working class community in Islington, a stone’s throw from Upper Street and the Angel. Of these London novels, Rosie Hogarth — published in 1951 — has the most profound sense of place and moment, and though hitherto the least regarded it is the most deserving of a new readership.

In all these novels, the principal characters are flawed, in many ways unattractive, yet the reader warms to them. They are portrayed with an affection that extends to the grimy streets that moulded them. Alexander Baron was not an exponent of London noir, but he enjoyed the more difficult aspects of the city. In that he was like the young George Gissing, one of Baron’s favourite writers, who was ensnared by London and intrigued by what most would regard as the more humdrum of its localities. But where Gissing was appalled by the lack of a cultural aesthetic in plebeian London, and never seemed to care much for those he wrote about, Baron displays a rich empathy with his key characters. The reader feels that this novelist cares about his cast.

Rosie Hogarth was the first of Alexander Baron’s London novels, published when its author was 33. The setting is precisely located, a stub of a street close to Chapel Market: ‘two short rows of two-storey cottages, once pleasantly rural, now blackened and neglected, with … a barber’s shop on one corner and a public house … on the other’. The folklorist A.L. Lloyd, writing in the year the novel appeared, described this hidden away corner of south Islington as ‘one of the last atolls of the old-time cockney life’. Of the terraced houses around Chapel Market, he remarked:

these have not the forlorn abandoned look of many London back streets. Something of the old elegance stays with them in the cut of a doorway or the harmony of a terrace-row. The face may be smudged but the air is still there. They are streets of character, lived in by people of character

That rings true of the street Baron depicts, Lamb Street, and there is still a faint echo of a proud and assertive cockney culture around Chapel Market today. There was no Lamb Street in this part of Islington – but there was and is a Baron Street precisely where the novel is set, a coincidence perhaps, but quite possibly a street name that excited the writer’s curiosity or even suggested the name under which he wrote.

Alexander Baron – known as Alec Bernstein until he began to be published – seems never to have lived in this part of Islington. But he knew it well, and has the confidence to take the reader into the parlour, the pub, the workplace, the music hall, the crowd, and the rituals and pains of courtship. Baron’s familiarity with and empathy for London, and his sharp appreciation of its social geography, is one of the delights of Rosie Hogarth. He describes the city as ‘an archipelago of life’ where ‘boroughs are like separate towns’:

The millions of Londoners are really broken up into tens of thousands of little clusters of life. Each is gathered round some centre, perhaps a street, perhaps a block of buildings, perhaps a market, perhaps a public house or a Working Man’s Club …

Within each of these little hives people live for each other as well as for themselves, and life generates a comfortable warmth. But the man or woman who tries to settle in London without gaining admission to one of these little communities … is on his own, and he can go mad or die for all anybody cares.

Jack Agass, the novel’s central character, has fought across Europe and worked in the Middle East, but once back into Lamb Street, his world is very constricted: working as a shopfitter near Kings Cross, making occasional forays in the West End, but rarely more than walking distance from his moorings.

The gradations of working class London are keenly observed. At one point, Jack Agass visits Hoxton, ‘hurrying through narrow, dirty streets that were all stamped with a squalor that was foreign to Lamb Street’.

To Jack, whose upbringing had imbued him with the outlook of that section of the working-class whose proudest possession is the word ‘respectable’, it was always unnerving to come here. The people in the ‘respectable’ streets hated these slums and their inhabitants as a reminder of their own origins and of the depths into which personal insecurity or some wrench of social change might one day plunge them again.

Jack is not ambitious or a social climber, but he has savings and a certain status. That goes, by and large, for Lamb Street — scrubbed, thrifty, decent working class.

Jack’s fiancée, Joyce Wakerell, a strong-willed Lamb Street girl, has dreams of moving on and out, musing of ‘a little house, somewhere in the outskirts’. When she visits a one-time neighbour who has moved into a new estate in Hackney, she’s entranced. “It doesn’t seem like ondon, does it? ... It’s all so clean, and — oh, all that grass and flowers. … If I lived here I’d be afraid it was a dream, and that I might wake up any minute and see dirty black walls again.” When her brother, a teacher, and his wife condescend to visit Lamb Street, however, it’s a painful comedy of social manners in which the author shows greater sympathy for the home side.

Ever present in Rosie Hogarth is the shadow of war, the subject which first prompted Alexander Baron to turn to novel writing. From the City, From the Plough (1948) made his reputation and many regard it as his best work. It is a raw and powerful account of the “poor bloody infantry” experience of the Second World War, first waiting for D-Day and then fighting doggedly inland from the Normandy beaches in the summer of 1944. It draws heavily on Baron’s own wartime experiences. The novel sold in huge numbers. Two years later, There’s No Home, set in Sicily in 1943, again borrowed from Baron’s war record. It established the author’s ability to portray strong female characters, evident also in Rosie Hogarth, which served him well in his career as a screenwriter of TV dramas.

Rosie Hogarth was, in creative terms, a change of direction — from life in uniform to civvy street, from the camaraderie born of shared combat to the more enduring sense of community in post-war, austerity London. Yet the lasting impact of six years of conflict is a constant refrain, shaping both the novel’s characters and the urban landscape. In the opening pages, Baron establishes that Lamb Street has been disfigured by war, and that four years after its end, Jack Agass has not been able to regain his bearings. Agass is almost Alexander Baron’s contemporary and from what can be gleaned of his war record, it echoes the author’s — fighting in Sicily and through France. Agass, unlike his creator, is an orphan of war, the First World War. Lamb Street has been his adopted home, and a happy one, but the flying bomb which has left a gash in the street also killed Kate Hogarth, the woman ‘he had grown up to worship as a mother’. That loss and the shock of hearing that Kate’s daughter and his childhood friend, Rosie, has — according to street wisdom — taken to selling sex troubles him deeply.

The novel is the story of Jack Agass’s post-war return to Lamb Street, his re-absorption into a caring (but at times cruel) community and his awkward courtship. All this is finely observed. The community, the neighbourhood, comes to life even more than the principal figures. As with From the City, From the Plough — and in sharp distinction to his later novels, The Lowlife and King Dido, which focus on ill-at-ease individuals — it is the assembly of characters that makes the piece. And in Rosie Hogarth, that ensemble is entirely gentile. Baron resisted being pigeon-holed as a Jewish writer and was resolutely secular in outlook, but his Jewish background was an important part of his identity. Of his novels, The Lowlife and even more so With Hope, Farewell (1952) are about being Jewish in a not always welcoming city. Several others touch fleetingly on the Jewish experience — but not Rosie Hogarth, his first literary depiction of London.

Alexander Baron’s Lamb Street is largely apolitical. There’s an occasional expression of class loyalty, most notably in the street’s generous support for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, ‘one of those blind and beautiful upsurges of human solidarity that sweep their class from time to time’. Rosie’s brother, Chris, gives his life to the labour cause, simply slogging it out on the doorstep when his health is too frail, but to little evident result. The street’s only communist, the mockingly named Mr. Prawn, is depicted as marginal and ineffective.

This makes the final twist to the novel all the more unexpected. An introduction is not the place to explore this denouement in detail. Suffice it to say that the closing pages of Rosie Hogarth, in their account of the title character’s life and politics, bear witness to what was then a recent and turbulent episode in Alexander Baron’s own life, his break with the Communist Party. As a teenager in north London, Baron became active in the left and was quickly won over to communism. Although he never held a party card, Alexander Baron was for years, in effect, a full-time communist activist and an acolyte of John Gollan, later the party leader. He became prominent in the Labour League of Youth, a target of party activity both as an aspect of the ‘popular front’ approach and as a potential source of recruits. He was editor of the League’s paper Advance and later of the Young Communist League’s Challenge.

Much of Baron’s as yet unpublished memoirs, compiled in the years before his death in 1999, is given over to his association with the Communist Party. It demonstrates how deeply he was immersed in party activity — ‘very heaven, it was, to be a Young Communist at this time’, he wrote of the late 1930s — and how he never quite made peace with his own past. By his own account, Baron had easy access to the party’s headquarters in Covent Garden and was on familiar terms with national leaders of what was a small but influential movement. He clearly enjoyed the subterfuge and manipulation practised in pursuit of party goals. After his enlistment in 1940, Baron recorded, the ‘army gradually replaced the Party as the object of loyalty’. But it was another seven or eight years before he made the final break. At one point in his memoirs, Baron talks of a ‘rendering of accounts’ with the Communist Party. It’s likely that the final section of Rosie Hogarth was part of that accounting process.

Alison Macleod and her husband, both communists, got to know Alexander Baron well — they were all active in the left-wing Unity Theatre — at just the time he was turning his back on the party. “I never could get Alec [Baron] to admit where he got her from, Rosie Hogarth”, she recalled recently. “There were lots of people slightly like her. I just didn’t think he had got it quite right.” The closing chapters don’t fit easily with the rest of the book. The style is laboured and at one point becomes a Shavian-style dialogue about politics and society. It’s tempting to see some of Rosie Hogarth’s political attitudes — her display of what her interlocutor describes as ‘bloody cold, hard arrogance … like polished granite’, and her disparagement of Lamb Street as ‘a slum of the spirit’ — as the author’s acknowledgement of his own erring ways when under Party tutelage.

The intrusion of the Communist Party into Rosie Hogarth is a little like its impact on Alexander Baron’s life and career: memorable, intriguing, but perhaps not the major chord. Baron’s first London novel is a warm, embracing account of a city emerging from the travails of war and of a working class culture struggling to find new form. There is just a hint of romanticism and nostalgia in Baron’s depiction of Lamb Street. Yet Rosie Hogarth stands as a tender evocation of a working class community. It is one of the best London novels of its era written by one of the defining London writers of the last century.

Andrew Whitehead